Last Saturday (9/8/18), the rain was falling here on Snoqualmie Pass, WA, as I’d figured. So, I loaded up the wagon, and rolled East, towards Leavenworth. Met up with Doc, where we had decided to try our luck getting through the Enchantments in a day (as a permit is needed to overnight, and they are quite hard to obtain). We had planned for 12 hours, which we’d found would have been an excellent hiking pace, as we completed the run in 9.5 hours (which gave us apx three 10 minute breaks). Seeing droves of hikers on the 18 mile stretch of trail, I now understand why permits are required for this section of the Cascades. This Snow Lake zone will definitely, give our Snow Lake on Snoqualmie Pass a run for its money, in regards to volume of hikers. If you do this epic trail, do it MID-WEEK.
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Friday, 8/31/2018, was my last chance to keep my crazy (at sometimes) streak alive… This past holiday weekend was one of those times I’d wondered what this Snow Trooper was doing, trying to find somewhere to ski. On the last day of the month, it doesn’t matter what the conditions are, rain, sideways snow or shine, you have to “JUST DO IT”! So, on the very last day of August, I was thinking I’d just head up to Rainier and slash the Paradise glacier, but I had a local friend that was heading to Mt. Hood for a combo of skiing and mountain biking. I ended up jumping on board, loaded the wagon and rolled South towards Timberline. Jen Tell and myself arrived just in time to claim a camp spot, rally to the ski area and walk up just below the mid-way station (below the Palmer snow patch, that’s right it’s nothing more than a patch of snow). It is very sad to think if the slope was not heavily salted, it would surly be dirt, by now. Very sad sight! 🙁
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We caught the last 10 minutes of the Sunset, soaked it in then skied the frozen vein of snow back to the Miracle Mile top station.
Below is a short video of linking 191 months of skiing… Bring on the Winter!

This past weekend was the 2nd annual Ragnar event at Crystal Mountain. Super cool event made up of mostly 8 person relay teams, I’d compare to Softball aka baseball for drinkers :-). It’s a super loose event where most people (myself included) have no idea how long their lap took, but more worried about the fact that hydration happened with beer and in my case DRU BRU. Oh yeah, the hardest part is waking up sometime in the middle of the night to do a leg, I was lucky mine was the green leg (3 miles). The video below is a mash up of my Yellow and Red trail laps. My green lap was ran around 3AM so I left the cam. The Yellow lap was a base area to gondola, and the red lap was from the gondola to the base area. Both were easy trails, but when pushing it for the Ragnar makes it a little bit of work, but fun!

Last night was the pre-funk party to kick off the actual Ragnar race on Friday morning (8/24/18). I captured the closing song “Gin and Juice” performed live by Dancehall Days. They sounded excellent and blew me away when they changed it up for the last tune… Snoop!

This past Saturday (8/18/18), we had a couple of friends tie the knot. Not much to say, except it was a beautiful ceremony at Gold Creek Pond (where the smoke had cleared out for this special day). After the ceremony, everyone headed up in the the Alpental neighborhood for excellent BBQ and fantastic local music.

Some smokey views of my run yesterday to Kendall Katwalk. The Katwalk is apx 5.5 miles from the TH or if you did like me and park on SR906 by Dru Bru and the Aardvark Express it is about 6.5 miles.” The TH is the PCT Northbound from Snoqualmie Pass and the grade is perfect to run most of the way up to the Katwalk. I thought it would be fun to spice in some clips of my homie, Jeff Rich, and myself hitting the skier’s right chute of the Double Barrel Shotgun Chutes (aka the Twins as of a few years ago).

Snow Lake overlook… Good place to lunch and turn-around, if the 3.5 is a little far for you.

Here’s a little visual report of one of the most popular trails in the state of Washington, Snow Lake. I didn’t feel the need to give any details on the run/hike this past Sunday (8/5/18), except it is usually busy and is one of the easier destinations at 3.5 miles to the “lake access”. I try to stay upright in whatever I’m doing in the mountains, but crossing one of the talus fields on my way down, I stumbled passing/chatting to a couple heading up, and took a nice deep puncture to the shin. Be careful, carry some medical items at least a small first aid kit and ALWAYS, “Live to Ski Another Day!”

One of the Alpental Bro’s Ryan Gillian, aka Tennessee, spends his Summer months river guiding. When he’s not guiding you might find him playing around with his squirt boat (a low profile kayak), which is designed to dive beneath the surface of the river. Last week, I ran into Ryan, and he’d let me know he found a sweet eddie at the confluence of the North and Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie River. So, this past Thursday (8/1/18), I met Tennessee down at “Three Forks Park (in North Bend, WA), took the short walk to the river and cooled down (especially in the flow from the North Fork that was at least 10 to 15 degrees colder).

This past weekend was the first annual, Raging River MTB Festival, off I-90’s exit 27. Saturday they had a cross country race and on Sunday they were rocking the enduro race. On Saturday (7/28/18) I found the time to get off the pass and check out the trails I’ve been hearing a lot about this Summer. I lucked out and didn’t even have pedal because, Compass Outdoor Adventures happened to be running a shuttle for only 20 bucks, which would cut out an hour and a half of climbing. unfortunately, I was solo coming down, as the rest of the shuttled riders, pushed further up the trail, to complete the “lollipop”. I recommend this trail for those of the beginner riding levels and/or those who love a good long climb followed up by a super long flow trail back to the TH.

The Mirror Lake hike or trail run from the Windy Pass TH, just may be my favorite “close to home”. This trail is apx 4 miles of perfect gain and loss that leads to one of the beautiful alpine lakes, just South of I-90. Always being that guy (in my younger dayz), running was very low on my list (unless downhill, coming back from a hike), however, this trail got me hooked and the up. I did learn a lot about ultra running, 4 or 5 years ago, watching Seth Swanson setting the current “Cascade Crest 100 Endurance Run” record @ 17:56 (breaking the former time of 18:27). What I learned from Seth, was on my run to Mirror lake and beyond, I would run everything, but Seth would power hike all of the steep sections I would run. My goal, was always to keep strong for skiing and ski touring. Yesterday, was my first time actually running with a 50 mile ultra runner (that is ready to step it up to the 100 mile mark), Lisa Green. Lisa is a new local to Snoqualmie Pass (that has always run up here though) and we took our first run yesterday to mirror lake with a couple of bonus tarns too (that you’ll have to find on your own, but you can figure it out 🙂 ).

Below is some of the clips from our Mirror lake and bonus tarns run. Enjoy and get out on your own adventure, ASAP!